Madam Speaker, I rise in the House today on Bill C-27, an act to provide the Canadian Food Inspection Agency with enforcement and inspection authorities.
When the CFIA was created in 1997, the objective was to facilitate a more uniform and consistent approach to food inspection in Canada. Instead, the legislative framework governing the CFIA resulted in a hodgepodge of legislative authority that was anything but uniform and consistent.
Employees of the CFIA have been administering and enforcing 13 different statutes without a uniform set of powers, rights or obligations, which this proposed act would finally give them.
Seven years after the creation of the CFIA, our veterinarians, inspectors, systems specialists, support employees, financial officers, researchers and laboratory technicians may finally receive the tools they need to do their jobs effectively. It is high time.
In the agriculture minister's news release on Bill C-27, the minister praised the Canadian Food Inspection Agency by stating, “Canadians have one of the best food inspection systems in the world”.
I must say that, as the official opposition critic for agriculture and agri-food, I echo the minister's comments in this regard. The fact that Canada's food supply is safe makes the closing of the U.S. and Japanese borders to the trade of Canadian livestock all the more frustrating since we all know that the U.S. and Japanese border closures had more to do with opportunism than fact and sound science.
That being said, we in the official opposition are heartened by the U.S. president's recent commitment to do all that he can to expedite the rule making process in order to resume trade of Canadian livestock. We are committed to working with the Canadian government and our U.S. counterparts to help ensure that this border is reopened just as soon as possible.
The minister claims that Bill C-27 would address a number of inconsistencies in existing enforcement and inspection legislation. He also claims that Bill C-27 is intended to provide the CFIA with new enforcement and inspection tools, similar to border enforcement provisions introduced by our major trading partner, the United States.
While the goals of the legislation are laudable, we in the official opposition have several concerns with the current legislation.
First, the Conservative Party of Canada generally supports a less intrusive approach to regulatory policy in Canada. For far too long, agriculture and agri-food producers in this country have had to deal with an ever increasing number of regulations imposed by various levels of government, creating unnecessary stress and burdens on Canadian producers.
Granting the CFIA authority to make regulations dealing with mandatory record keeping, food quality and safety programs could result in regulations being created without adequate consideration for the implications felt from these by the agriculture and agri-food industries.
In this respect, we are concerned that the key agriculture and agri-food stakeholders impacted by this legislation have not been adequately consulted in preparation of this bill.
While the minister claims that consultations have taken place in the development of Bill C-27, we do remain skeptical as to the degree of this consultation.
During a briefing my office received from the CFIA officials, I took the opportunity to ask them precisely which stakeholders had been consulted in this process. The best they could do was assure me that consultations did in fact take place. However they failed to specify with whom they had consulted.
Just yesterday my office was informed that neither the Canadian Federation of Agriculture nor its key stakeholder members had been consulted in any way in the development of this proposed legislation.
To come up with legislation that can have such a large impact on agriculture and agri-food producers without consulting them in the process is indicative of this government's approach to agriculture policy. That is a top down approach with a certain disregard, if not outright contempt, for Canadian agricultural producers.
We trust that the government will ensure that agricultural and agri-food processes are truly consulted in a responsible, open and transparent manner.
We in the Conservative Party will be pushing for these consultations to take place when this bill is referred to the agriculture committee and we will do all that we can to ensure that the concerns of agricultural producers are heard and acted on accordingly.
Although the legislation is a step in the right direction, it is unfortunate that the government took so very long to provide food inspection and enforcement officers with the necessary tools to do the job to the best of their ability.
I find it hard to believe that since the Canadian Food Inspection Agency's inception in 1997 the Liberal government waited seven whole years to make the CFIA fully operational. This delay and inaction from the Liberal government has presented the CFIA from doing the job it needs to do when responding to emergency situations affecting Canada's food supply.
The CFIA's inability to deal effectively in a crisis recently came to light in a troubling internal review of the CFIA's handling of the BSE crisis. This internal review, made public by the Vancouver Sun through access to information, underscores some very worrisome findings.
It stated that the Liberal government's response to the mad cow crisis was plagued by poor planning, staffing problems and repeated failures to share information. Furthermore, it highlighted several gaping holes in the CFIA's ability to deal with future emergencies, such as a possible outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease or a repeat of avian flu.
The review, completed for the Canadian Food Inspection Agency on December 10, 2003, by an outside consultant, warned that if the CFIA did not take steps to fix some of the problems identified, they “could undermine CFIA's ability to respond to more complex or time-critical emergencies”, raising questions about the agency's handling of last spring's avian flu outbreak in the Fraser Valley.
It came to our attention that this review, entitled “CFIA BSE Emergency Response Assessment Report”, was actually written several months after the cow infected with BSE was discovered in Alberta, but before an Alberta-born cow with BSE was discovered in Washington state in late December.
In fairness, the assessment concluded that in general the CFIA's response to the BSE crisis was a success, but there were many areas of concern, including the following.
While the CFIA had declared an agency-wide emergency to respond to the BSE crisis, it did a poor job of communicating that, even to its own staff. As a result, several months after the crisis, many of the staff believed that an emergency had not even been declared.
Another concern included the finding that the CFIA's chief veterinary officer was designated as the agency spokesman on BSE, despite a standing policy not to assign spokesperson's duties to someone with critical responsibilities. “As a result,” the report says, “some key activities were not taken or were not completed on time”.
In addition, another finding showed that the start-up of an emergency operation centre in Ottawa to handle the BSE crisis was delayed, leading to confusion in procedures for obtaining decisions and in communicating decisions to those who needed them.
There was no plan in place to provide backup staffing. “Primary response participants were exhausted by the end of the response period and a longer response could not have been sustained with the same staff,” the report states.
In general, the report concluded, problems with communications and information sharing meant that “time that should have been spent focusing on the emergency response was spent on developing communications procedures and tools instead”.
The report makes 23 recommendations, including upgrading emergency operations facilities and rotating emergency response staff.
In light of the CFIA's refusal to say how many of the recommendations of the review were acted upon, I have called upon the Minister of Agriculture to publicly state what steps he has taken to address the numerous concerns outlined in this review. To this day I have had absolutely no response from the minister's office.
The safety of Canada's food supply demands the minister's prompt and decisive action in this regard, so I ask the minister again to stop hiding behind this internal review and publicly state what steps he has taken to address the many concerns outlined in this critical report.
With regard to Bill C-27, the CFIA has stated that this bill will enhance consumer protection by addressing new and emerging threats to the safety and security of human, animal and plant health.
It is important to note that this bill fails to ensure necessary protection for our Canadian livestock producers facing potential new and emerging threats. While we can all agree that consumer protection is essential, we must not forget the threats that face the farm.
This Liberal government currently has no concrete action plan--